Can You Explain Why Is Qualitative User Research Valuable? ーThe First Step To Implement Design Thinking To Old Fashioned Corporations
Design thinking has seen increasing popularity for a while, not only in San Francisco, where there are many liberal tech startup companies, but even in Japan, where many of my clients are located, and which has a more conservative business style. Design thinking is becoming accepted as a viable business tool. I am now working in the design field in Amsterdam.
People know the concept and value of design thinking; however, it is often difficult to explain the value of qualitative user research to upper management. This is especially true in traditional companies where business decisions have historically been based on quantitative statistical data.
While engaged in research projects, I have often trained professionals from traditional companies in design thinking. Once exposed to design thinking, they quickly see its value and often approach upper management for a training budget. However, I noticed that most people struggled to introduce design thinking process into their companies.
Implementing Design Thinking Is Not Easy!
Why? — I think it is because many of the old school businessmen are accustomed to working with quantitative statistical data and are reluctant to risk trying something unfamiliar. (I talked about this more in my previous article, please check it out.)
The real challenge of incorporating design thinking into the traditional corporation is convincing management of the value of findings of qualitative user research.
That is why a deep understanding of qualitative user research in design thinking is crucial for those corporate professionals introducing the concept.
In this article, I try to explain the “WHAT,” “WHY,” and “HOW” of qualitative user research as used in design thinking.
So… WHAT Is User Research?
I found a blog on the Interaction Design Foundation website that explains user research pretty nicely. I quote from there.
User research is the methodic study of target users — including their needs and pain points — so designers have the sharpest possible insights to work with to make the best designs.
User researchers use various methods to expose problems and design opportunities and find crucial information to use in their design process.
Generative Studies vs Evaluative Studies
User research is for understanding users at a deeper level. Specifically, it tries to achieve an in-depth picture of the target’s needs and wants. Researchers often take many different techniques, such as user interviews, observation, survey research, ethnographic research, user testing, etc.
When talking about user research, it is sometimes referred to as “Generative Studies” or “Evaluative Studies,” depending on the phase of the research.
The purpose of “Generative Studies” is to explore users’ values and problems and identify business opportunities.
On the other hand, “Evaluative Studies” examines whether or not the hypothesized problem exists and if the proposed solution works by prototyping and testing.
In creating a business model based on design thinking, we foster valuable services and products.
Since this article aims to explain the starting point of implementing design thinking, I will focus on “Generative Studies,” which tries to identify business opportunities.
Qualitative Research vs Quantitative Research
When we talk about user research, there are two different methods in use: “Qualitative Research” and “Quantitative Research.”
Qualitative research targets information that cannot be expressed in numbers, such as people’s behavior and emotions.
Whereas quantitative research creates statistics. In qualitative research, a larger number of people can be research objectives by mainly using surveys.
I want to emphasize that generative studies, which try to identify new opportunities, have weighted values based on qualitative research rather than quantitative research.
WHY “Qualitative” User Research Is So Important?
Businessmen Love Logics and Numbers
In a business project, we are often required to derive, to show logically, what effects will be produced. As mentioned above, the number of research subjects is limited when we use qualitative research based on interviews.
For this reason, it is sometimes unacceptable for those accustomed to making business decisions based on large pools of statistical data, to see the application of the results of qualitative research to business opportunities.
‘We’re having a hard time convincing upper management of the value of the business opportunities we’ve found with the results of our qualitative research.” I often hear this, even in the designers’ meetup events in San Francisco, where the process is well known.
However, I still want to say this with confidence. When creating a new service or product using a design thinking approach, what we want to give more weight to is “qualitative research.”
First of All… Can You Explain the True Value of Design Thinking?
Before explaining qualitative research, can you convince others how design thinking makes a difference in business planning?
By approaching the emotional needs of people, design thinking helps us to create services that people become attached to.
Why would it be so attractive? Because design thinking services approach problems that users have been struggling with subconsciously.
In this way, design thinking helps us to find unique and valuable business opportunities.
How Design Thinking Helps Us To Find Valuable Opportunities?
In the first place, design thinking is a mindset that “defines potential problems that users are unaware of through deep empathy, and creates solutions that approach them through prototyping and testing”.
Compared to approaching functional needs that are recognized by users (such as “I want -” or “I am having trouble about -”), utilizing emotional needs, especially the ones that the user is not even aware of, can provide a much greater impact.
For the new design thinkers, it is difficult to comprehend that we consider interviewed users as representative of “people who have the value of XXX in the context of OOO.”
We then try to extract a common, yet deep, need in people in a similar context. In this way, we can uncover deep needs, which are difficult to approach by categorizing people superficially with demographic information such as age, gender, or living location.
Crafting unobvious insight is the key to having unique and valuable points of view for designing good services.
Only Qualitative Research Can Approach Surprising Insights
To uncover people’s deeper needs, unrealized even by themselves, we need to empathize and understand their underlying motivations and feelings. That is why, when you conduct user research, being aware of your user’s life values, environment, and situation are very important.
You cannot find out what users truly need without understanding “When”, “With what kind of feeling”, and “Why” they take specific actions.
The significant benefit of qualitative research, such as interviewing and observation, is that we gain greater insights into the users. Qualitative research allows us to see the less obvious motivations in the context of people’s actual lives. These facts are surprising and interesting, and fuel to design valuable services.
Whereas, we see little or no context conducting surveys. For this reason, we emphasize qualitative research when we take a design thinking approach.
I believe this diagram compares the qualitative and qualitative research accurately.
In design thinking, being insightful is the key to uncover deep user needs that even users themselves don’t realize. The combination of interviewing and observation is effective because we gain insight by seeing contradictions between what the user says and what they do.
When people do something that contradicts what they say, it is indicative of strong unconscious needs and values. Keep in mind that users often don’t know what they really feel, and therefore they can misinform unconsciously.
However, I don’t mean qualitative research is superior to quantitative research. Quantitative analysis is a valuable tool for supporting hypotheses. In a business scenario, we often use quantitative data to convince upper management of the validity of our proposals.
Data from quantitative research is useful to support design opportunities found through qualitative research. Also, quantitative data can be used for risk management and logical decision making. Survey research is useful to understand the big picture and trends of a specific group of people. I often use surveys to select interviewees from multiple applicants.
HOW? Key of Successful User Research
Being Curious and Open-minded Are the Basic Skills of Successful User Research
The most important criteria for succeeding in design thinking is the researcher’s attitude. Empathizing with and understanding the users requires limitless curiosity and open-mindedness.
Do not forget that others are surprisingly different from yourself. Always be aware of your unconscious biases.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of understanding users in depth. Curiosity is the fuel for understanding users. We always want to ask ourselves “Why?” “Is that really true?” to avoid assumptions and gain a clear understanding.
An open non-judgmental mindset is essential to reduce biases and accept the facts as they are. This open attitude invites users to share their true feelings.
It is human nature that we believe that our assumptions are universal. This makes us lazy, restricts our curiosity, and we then miss the opportunity to uncover further truths about users. Being curious and open-minded are simple concepts yet difficult attitudes to practice. I believe having this attitude is the most important user research skill to prioritize, even over learning other research techniques.
Three Basic User Research Methodologies
There are many different user research techniques. Below I will explain the three most basic approaches.
1. ONE on ONE Interview
Format：ONE on ONE interview between an interviewer and interviewee. In this procedure, the interviewer asks the interviewee about themselves, their opinion towards the research topic, their daily lifestyle, their own experience, etc. The interviewer focuses on understanding how an interviewee thinks and what kind of values they have.
Pros: It is easier to get personal information, without distractions from other interviewees than group interviews. Also, there is more flexibility to dig deeper into one specific topic.
Cons：The interviewer cannot observe how the interviewee interacts in a group.
2. Focus Group Interview
Format：This uses a group discussion style with four to six participants and a moderator. Participants talk and discuss the research topic with moderation.
Pros：When you recruit participants from a certain type of community, you can see the common values and experiences shared within the community. Also, you can see the personality of each participant by observing how they react to the other participants. People often show empathy to others during group sessions.
Cons：You have less time to focus on each individual’s remarks. Participants sometimes follow other people’s leads, groupthink, and don’t share their honest opinion and feelings. You always need to be mindful to facilitate a conversation with each participant. Introducing ice break sessions at the beginning of the session is effective.
3. Ethnography
Format：In the academic context, ethnography is the research approach where a researcher lives in the same community as the research object for a certain amount of time and tries to understand them. However, in the business context, researchers don’t live in their community in most cases.
Before corona, a researcher often visited a user’s house or office for an hour or so and observed the user’s life. Currently, researchers often manage to conduct ethnographic studies digitally.
Instead of visiting an actual place, we often ask for a video house tour or mobile journaling. We also observe digital spaces like social media communities and virtual conference rooms, which users often use as a virtual personal space.
Pros：Living environment reflects and affects a person’s values and lifestyle. Understanding those elements helps us uncover “why” the user takes a specific action. Observing a user’s actual life gives us many chances to note contradictions between their remarks and actions. These contradictions are significant indicators of strong potential user needs. When you identify a discrepancy, take it seriously and analyze it deeply.
Cons：This is not really a con, but in most cases, a user knows that they are watched for research. Therefore, we always need to remember that they will react differently than they normally would.
To Sum Up…
The starting point of design thinking is discovering the deeper user needs of which even the user is not aware. The tool for doing this is qualitative user research, which allows us to approach the “WHY” of users’ motivation.
It is not easy to understand others, and that is why we try to gather as much authentic user information and insights as possible. Analyzing qualitative data and crafting sharp insights are important to shape good services and products.
This article explains, at a very basic level, user research as gathered in design thinking. As I said, I have often noticed that there are many corporate professionals who understand the concept of design thinking but cannot initiate its application.
I hope this article helps those wanting to implement design thinking in their business decision process to understand the value of qualitative research and how to take their first steps in design thinking.
Let’s start talking to and observing users with curious and open minds:)
